An inventive and thoroughly
entertaining salute to a great British eccentric also becomes a
panorama of twentieth-century comedy, as one man's story is told
through pastiches and loving parodies of the pop culture that shaped
him.

And if that sounds even the
slightest bit serious and arty, let
me rush to reassure you that the show is a hoot from start to
finish.

Screaming Lord Sutch was a
B-list rock star of the 1960s, notable
more for his bizarre Alice Cooper-Marilyn Manson onstage persona than
for his musical talent.

But in 1963 he discovered a
hobby that was to
become his real contribution as a performance artist – standing
(Americans would call it running) for political office.

In Britain
anyone who pays a relatively small fee can be a candidate in any
election, and over more than three decades Sutch stood as a spoof
candidate for Parliament more than 40 times.

He rarely got more than
a few hundred votes (though others in his Monster Raving Loony Party
did win some local council seats). But he did get to stand up there
on the platform with the terribly serious Tory and Labour candidates,
taking the Mickey out of the whole process.

James Graham, author of
such serious political dramas as The Vote, The Angry Brigade and This
House, never lets his knowledge of how the system works – and how
easily it can be ridiculed – stand in the way of his celebration of
this colourful gadfly.

But he goes even further,
by invoking the
spirits of every comic voice that helped shape Sutch and his times,
from the Chaplin films and Christmas pantos he enjoyed as a child,
through the Goons, the Carry On films, Pete and Dud, the Pythons, Ab
Fab and beyond, and part of the sheer fun of the evening is playing
Spot The Reference.

Sutch's beloved mother is a
Panto dame, his
pre-rock job as a window cleaner is a 'Quick – under the bed, it's
my husband' farce from a Robin Askwith Confessions film, raising the
funds for his first campaign is a Tommy Cooper magic trick.

A Monster
Raving Loony Party conference is a scene out of Hi-de-Hi, standing
alongside the serious candidates evokes the famous David Frost 'I
look down on him' sketch, and outfoxing bureaucrats trying to stop
him requires a Blackadder cunning plan.

And so on, and so on, every
pop culture reference apt and delightful, while making the
semi-serious point of giving Screaming Lord Sutch his place in a
British tradition of subversive comedy.

Samuel James plays Sutch as
an irresistibly loony clown on the double mission of exposing the
serious politicians as the real fools while also just having fun,
while everyone else in the cast ably quadruples and quintuples roles
playing Everyone Else.

In the high British
tradition of low comedy
Monster Raving Loony hides its anarchic intentions until you're
laughing too much to be able to resist them.

You might actually come
away from this show thinking some serious thoughts about the
ridiculous side of the political process. But don't let that prospect
scare you away. You will do nothing but enjoy yourself while you're
there.